Monday, December 2, 2013

Far Behind

OK, it's time for my annual "Wow, so much has happened since I last posted" post.

My last series of posts were geared towards recovering from Google canceling Reader, and trying to get the designers of Feedly to install some functions that Reader had...specifically the ability to subscribe to a post with a single button, and the ability to bundle a group of feeds together and share them easily.

The results were mixed: they DID create the first function....it's now very simple to subscribe to a blog and put that subscription into a folder with a single button, and I'd like to think that my communication with them had a role in this, but I'm not really sure.

Especially because there seems to have been very little motion in the second arena; there is still no 'bundling' function in Feedly, and that seriously is impacting how I can use Feedly to monitor my student blogs.

HOWEVER, something else happened in the meantime along this front.

In his blog, an associate (I use that term very loosely...he probably doesn't really know me from Adam) Jeff Utecht posted about the upside of Reader going away. I stated in his comments about my hopes that they replicate the bundling functionality, and talked about my conversations with Arthur via this blog. My comment was read by Wes Fryer, a high-profile blogger in Educational Technologies, and he reposted my blog post as a model for what support for blogging in HS should look like,

Suddenly, the number of hits on this blog skyrocketed! Instead of the 20-30 views a month that it usually gets, I started getting 1000+ hits per day! Woo HOO.

However, that generated something unusual. Up until that day, the purpose of this blog was to serve as an historical record for other schools who are moving to a 1:1 environment. I wanted to archive our experiences and learning curve so others could benefit from them. What it was NOT was a soapbox where I could post my ideas on the future trends in Ed Tech, or give my points of view on diverse topics. There are already plenty of blogs like that out there, and I'm not entirely sure what purpose they serve.

As a result, the spike in readership didn't last all that long. After a few months, the number of hits has gone down to a more reasonable level (I really don't think I have enough to say to keep five or six thousand people interested), and the 'performance anxiety' that this created has subsided.

So anyway....that explains why I haven't posted in awhile. Keep watching over the next week or so and I'll catch up on our Year 4 rollover, and my ideas on the Future of Ed Tech (lol....seriously). I also will share some thoughts on my upcoming Gap Year....stay tuned. :-)

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